Using Drawings to Understand Impacts of Soft Robotics Activity on Elementary Age Students’ Perceptions of Robots

摘要

This Innovative Practice article aims to address the gender disparities that persist across traditional engineering disciplines including mechanical and electrical engineering. Participation in K12 educational robotics is a common foundation to enrollment in engineering majors, however the gender gap in traditional K12 robotics perpetuates the gender disparity. We hypothesize that soft robotics is a field that may promote interest in robotics and appeal to young female students’ enthusiasm for bioengineering and healthcare applications of engineering. Our previous work has focused on middle and high school curricula. However, after having the opportunity to bring our soft robotics curriculum to even younger students, we thought critically about project design and ease of implementation for this age group. Perceptions of who can participate in engineering are formed as early as elementary school for some students. We piloted a soft-robotics activity over three one-hour meetings with an elementary-aged Girl Scout troop where participants earned three Daisy Girl Scout Robotics badges. To assess perceptions of robotics, we developed the Draw a Robot Task (DART) from previous Draw a Scientist Tests and Draw an Engineer Tests to better understand children’s perception of robots and those who build robots. The survey includes the prompts "Draw a robot." And "Draw someone building a robot". We present results from survey responses from the Girl Scout participants conducted before and after their exposure to soft robotics. Surveys captured the students’ drawings and perceptions of robotics and who builds robots. Survey responses and development of a validated measure will inform the use of soft robotics in grades as early as elementary school. We aim to evaluate an alternative robotics curriculum that is specifically designed to create inclusive robotics spaces for female students with the goal of reducing the gender disparity in STEM and traditional engineering majors.